Last modified: 2005-01-19 18:57:00 UTC
"Link spam" or "Comment Spam" is the practice of someone putting links to their own pages in Wikis, Blogs and other places in order to raise their page's ranking in search engines by creating bogus links. Google has devised <a href="http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html"> a method</a> to make this undesirable practice ineffective. I recommend that Wikipedia place this feature on the list of things to be implemented. How it is done is, for external links, automatically insert <B> rel="nofollow" </B> in the generated html. Here is a quote from the example: '''Q: How does a link change?'''<BR> A: Any link that a user can create on your site automatically gets a new "nofollow" attribute. So if a blog spammer previously added a comment like <br> Visit my <a href="http://www.example.com/">discount pharmaceuticals</a> site. <br> That comment would be transformed to <br> Visit my <a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">discount pharmaceuticals</a> site. I think this will be a useful feature to make link spam not worth bothering to do or less significant. <BR> Paul Robinson 18:37, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Already implemented and live on Wikipedia and co.
